If god exists, he’d be a theist, stop saying he’d be an atheist

“God himself is an atheist because God himself does not believe in a creator.” – random internet atheist

About once a week, someone in Atheism United makes the comment, “God himself is an atheist because God himself does not believe in a creator.’ While I get that on one hand it might be attempting to normalize the idea of atheism, it’s actually not true, and it embraces the notion that a god exists.

The unintentional premise here is that there’s a god. God is an atheist? Ok, so you believe in a god, but he’s an atheist? God doesn’t exist, we have no reason to believe a god exists, and we shouldn’t be promoting the notion that an atheistic god exists.

I’ve also seen this variant: “If god exists, he’s an atheist, because even he doesn’t believe in god.”

It gets the definition of atheism wrong. An atheist is someone who lacks belief in the existence of god(s). Atheism isn’t the belief in a god more powerful than you. It isn’t the belief in a “higher” power. A theist is someone who believes in the existence of a god. Therefore if a god exists (it doesn’t), and it had any awareness that it was a god, it would be a theist, not an atheist.

When I hear this argument, I can’t help but think how bad it is. It might attempt to sound witty, but it’s weak, and it doesn’t help us at all. 

Another bad variant: “God himself is an atheist because God himself does not believe in his creator.” Atheism isn’t the belief in not being created. Atheists know they were created by their parents. Atheism is the absence of belief in gods, and any god would presumably know it was a god, that it exists, and would therefore be a theist.